Hello World

Birmingham | Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

Awards & Nominations

Hello World has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Upon A Star

High-Level Project Summary

We developed a scrolling-game where the user is able to learn the information about variable stars by walking across the screen. They can then put themselves and their new knowledge to the test with the quiz option after having gone through the game.This had solved the challenge through the simple and relevant information. Rather than just showing it in a standard way, the user gets to read the information whilst they are moving as a 'rocket' through the surface of the moon. This adds an element of fun for the user whilst they learn more about variable stars. We also added the quiz to make the game more interactive for the user. This allows for it to be both educational and enjoyable.

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/evaktar/Upon-A-Star---NASA-Space-Apps

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/108OxjzPnINv7ZyPbuKsA9I8k4a2xAQ7Y/view?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

For our project, we used python and its module pygame to create an interactive yet informative game about variable stars. The user is able to walk across a platform in the gameplay - reading and learning about the topic whilst also experiencing a 2D world upon the surface of the moon in starry surroundings.

Once the user has completed so, they then have the option to go back to the menu and test their knowledge by selecting the quiz option and seeing what they score out of 5 within the quiz.

This project will allow for information to be presented and tested in a much more enjoyable and less time-consuming manner than if the user where to try and find all the information themselves - believe me it took us a while to find the information.

I hope to achieve a fun and educational game which will satisfy users - especially those who did not even have much interest in stars in the first place as this would mean the game has succeeded in winning the interest of those who are unbothered about the topic and the game could allow for the information to be spread more if even the uninterested are to gain an interest through this.

Additionally, we used Tkinter for the quiz part of the game. I had mostly used the standard IDLE with pygame and used the Spyder program to check any errors that IDLE was not being to clear with and when I needed to track the data types (integers, strings and etc.)

Space Agency Data

Open data from NASA was used to include more accurate information about variable stars along with other open data. Along with photos and representations from NASA to show the user an examples of stars and supernovas. NASA articles were also used to fact check the open data retrieved.

Hackathon Journey

We were inspired to choose this challenge as we believed that creating a game would fit these criterias and specifications the most out of all challenges and we had desired to format this project as a game. Our approach to developing this project was using a coding language and modules we were both familiar with such as python: pygame and Tkinter since we were both not too confident in our coding skills.

Due to out lack of experience in coding skills we had several setbacks, plenty of errors and such. As we were unsure of how to implement the quiz part of our game in pygame, the team member who knew how to make a quiz using Tkinter due to previous experience had coded it separately which we then implemented into the main game as an option.

Our experience was difficult due to out lack of experience and skills, but a lot has been learnt through this experience and it was worth taking part in this. I personally have not worked together in a coding project with another person before so this was a completely new experience for me. It had been very difficult and frustrating but we managed to get somewhere with the process although due to the lack of time we did not fully finish the whole game and there are some loose ends that would need tying such as the quiz part that we re-implemented into the game after testing it out in isolation not working with the rest of the game.

The topic itself was also very new to us so we had to learn this topic as we went along. There was a lot of confusion with the stars and constellations but we had eventually understood enough to explain it to the user.